Roger Ebert likes to say, "Good movies aren't for everybody, only mediocre ones are."
Ever Since the World Ended can be filed into the former category. It's a good movie, and it's not for everybody.
The movie opens with a young man speaking into the camera, filmed on a rather poetic PAL digital. He explains that he's going to go out and talk to people, many who have not spoken about their experiences in over 10 years.
Ever Since the World Ended takes the mockumentary film genre and gently places it within Science Fiction. Two documentarians are talking to people in the city of San Francisco, all 186 left after a major plague destroys civilization. The movie is paced and talkative, with only a few apocalyptic scenes, all of them quiet examinations of carnage that could be missed by a passive viewer. The film makes an early and subtle distinction between two groups of people: the adults who remember the world the way it was before the plague and teenagers who have only vague memories of the former great civilization.
The adults in the film are almost completely handicapped by their knowledge of the past, at least from the perspective of the children and teenagers. They lament the situation they are currently in and desperately try to get close to the living conditions they had before. Many people in the community in San Francisco live in homes with electricity and running water. Logically, individuals have set up their lives in ways that reflect their ideologies. One particular person gathers goods from the abandoned homes and trades them for other goods and services. In contrast with the other commune-style households in the area, he's questioned on his morality of such actions in the context everyone is living in. The rest of the people have attempted an egalitarian community, where individuals perform different functions for the sake of the community rather than any form of bartering or remuneration.
This film inspired long and creative discussion between my partner and I after we finished. We discussed hypothetical (as most science fiction inspires) and our plan to immediately jack some farmland and start the agricultural cycle before we're forced nomadic due to procrastination or post-traumatic stress. My partner had an extreme concern for knowledge, as a great deal of modern knowledge is institutionalized, and a small community would not be able to continue that project. I identified with the perspective of the many teenagers in the film: we as humans can not dwell in the past and must adjust ourselves with our context. We can't lament over video games, expedient transportation and the internet, we must become knowledgeable about the skills that will help us become sustainable. We must maintain the past through literature, art and architecture, but exercise our culture in the present.
Of course, all my banterings are totally hypothetical. This film didn't feel that way, however, as the documentary format gave the story an immediacy without spectacle. The viewer experiences the layers and conflicts within the experiences of each character as the film subtley touches on a variety of important themes. There are no moral or concrete messages that are pushed on you, every theme is delicately strung within the relationships of the community members and the detached experiences of the documentary makers.
